The woman, barely five feet tall, outwardly as delicate as a snowflake, shovels the deck in front of her beloved town hall, digging like she’s clearing her driveway while her car idles in the street.
She’s the one who put up the two wreaths on the old, wooden double doors. She’s the one who put the two electric candles in those old windows, giving warmth to an abandoned building that’s cold inside, colder than it is outside.
Her name is Pat Cutter, and she has a dream to keep Andover’s town hall relevant. That’s why she and seven other residents shelled out $141,000 last fall to buy it.
She’s an 85-year-old widow, a sparkplug who lives in Andover and zips up the stairs of the old building like it was a Sunday walk in the park.
She despises smart phones, choosing a flip phone instead, and she speaks her mind with the charm and humor of a New Englander whose warmth is closer to the surface than she probably realizes.
“Excited? Of course. Why would I be in it if I wasn’t,” Cutter tells me, reminding me that I’ve asked a dumb question. “I adopted Andover as my town kind of late in life. I’m very glad I did, and this is a wonderful building, right in the center of town. I just can’t see it destroyed and not put to some sort of good public use.”
Deb Brower is out front of the town hall as well, also shoveling, also investing time and money, also trying to recapture the past in a way that seems old fashioned these days.
“It’s a long held vision of mine, a community center,” says Brower, who moved to New Hampshire from New York 11 years ago. “I thought this would be perfect for it.”
There are six more locals involved, six others who make up the backbone of this vision, all of whom are native to some place else, yet settled in the town known for Proctor Academy. They are Larry and Susan Chase, Steve and Gisela Darling, and Stacey and Eric Viandier.
They are middle-aged and retirees, hoping to keep a piece of the past alive while being mindful of the needs of the youth in town. Maybe they’ll create an after-school program there for teens, then a gathering spot for adults at night, complete with a commercial kitchen.
Food always seems to bring a town together, doesn’t it? A town hall does, too. In fact, this particular town hall, built in 1879, once did just that.
Once, people danced there, watched plays, listened to music, played basketball, voted, debated, gossiped, spit tobacco juice.
Once, according to the diary of longtime resident Helen Phelps, who graduated from Proctor Academy in 1905, “A picket fence set it apart from the main road. Hitching posts and rails were at both sides of the building. Kerosene street lamps, I believe two in number, and a reflector lantern at the door, helped dispel the darkness.”
Larry Chase’s family, seven generations worth, has been vacationing and summering in Andover since the 1940s, traveling from New Jersey before retiring here with Susan in 2008. He swam in Bradley Lake, boated there, fished there. He remembers the town hall, back when town halls, pulsating with culture and the arts and Friday night mischief, gave a town identity and energy.
“You can have special events, weddings or organization meetings,” said Larry Chase, who retired from the public relations business 20 years ago. “We get a lot of people who told us, without asking, their recollections of what they remember, and the dances and the basketball and the plays and a magician who came through. Some of them had their first dates and got their first kiss outside of the building.”
The old feel remains on the first floor, built 14 years after the Civil War ended. That’s where you’ll find the dressing area behind the stage, the wood-planked floor of the basketball court and the tiny outhouse, hidden behind an old, narrow door.
Slowly, the town staple, always dependable, lost its value. The nearby grade and middle schools built a gym and auditorium. Other buildings were better suited for meetings. Radio, TV and other forms of modern entertainment eroded its usefulness further still.
Offices with dusty printers and computer monitors reveal a recent era, when a medical billing operation and dance and karate studios were tenants. Then, rumors swirled that a developer was eying the site for a fancy restaurant, perhaps a McDonalds.
Cutter and company said no. They morphed into a team of eight and bought the building at a foreclosure auction after the private owner was delinquent on payments.
They weren’t sure what the future held, but they were sure they had done the right thing. They meet once a week at Brower’s. She cooks dinner, chicken, steak, shrimp, and they sit at a round table and talk strategy. They hope to obtain a grant or investors or private donations to recoup their money, but they’ve accepted the fact that the town hall may, in fact, remain theirs to own.
I made the mistake of asking Cutter, who settled in Andover 30 years ago from Massachusetts, if she had any doubts about forking over her slice of the $141,000 price tag.
“Sir, at my age, would I have invested the amount I did to keep this building if it felt that way?” Cutter asked. “Come on. We are very dedicated to this work.”
The group has its feelers out. They’re giving tours of the building and so far have hosted students of all ages, plus administrators from Proctor Academy. They’ve traveled to other town halls, in Wilmot and Danbury, searching for ideas.
They’ve got a stack of suggestions from students three inches tall, with one asking for a zoo, many wanting a pool table and others looking for a place to go after school.
After a storm, meanwhile, you’ll find committee members like Brower and Cutter shoveling the steps and deck in front of the town hall. There’s a bees nest jammed into the triangular top of the roof, and the year “1879” in black block letters is a few feet below it.
The seven actually looks like an upside down two. No one seems to know why.
“I have no idea,” Cutter said. “It’s been that way forever. It’s like they got the number wrong and put it up anyway.”
That didn’t stop those who built it.
And my sense is it won’t stop Pat Cutter, either.